A New Life

A New Life

A Novel

Bernard Malamud

When Sy Levin, a high school teacher beset by alcohol and bad decisions, leaves the city for the Pacific Northwest to start over, it's no surprise that he conjures a vision of the extraordinary new life awaiting him there: "He imagined the pioneers in covered wagons entering this valley for the first time. Although he had lived little in nature Levin had always loved it, and the sense of having done the right thing in leaving New York was renewed in him."

Soon after his arrival at Cascadia College, however, Levin realizes he has been taken in by a mirage. The failures pile up anew, and Levin, fired from his post, finds himself back where he started and little the wiser for it.

A New Life—as Jonathan Lethem's introduction makes clear—is Malamud at his best: with his belief in luck and new beginnings Sy Levin embodies the thwarted yearning for transcendence that is at the heart of all Malamud's work.

“Malamud has written a moving, funny, satiric third novel ... rich in ideas, paradox and the variety of human nature... Levin is one of the most appealingly, sadly, funnily human people in recent fiction and A New Life is a wonderful book.” —Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
“The special qualities of Bernard Malamud's fiction which set it apart as serious art ... are its evocation of genuine pity for the calamities which overtake men, its scrupulous and deft playing of an ironic attitude against this pity, and its insistently moral structuring of event.” —The New York Times

About the Author

Bernard Malamud (1914–1986) was an American novelist and short story writer celebrated for his richly moral fiction and his exploration of Jewish American life. Born in Brooklyn to Russian immigrant parents who ran a small grocery store, Malamud drew on that working-class, immigrant milieu throughout his career, even when his stories ventured into other settings and subjects.

He first gained wide acclaim with The Natural (1952), a mythic baseball novel later adapted into the popular 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His reputation was cemented with The Assistant (1957) and the story collection The Magic Barrel (1958), which won the National Book Award. In 1967, his novel The Fixer, based on the real-life case of a Jewish man falsely accused of ritual murder in czarist Russia, won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a second National Book Award.

Alongside Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Malamud is often regarded as one of the great voices of 20th-century Jewish American literature, known for blending realism with fable-like, allegorical touches and a deep concern with suffering, guilt, and redemption. He taught for many years at Bennington College in Vermont and continued writing until his death in 1986.

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